The Severnaya Communa of April 2, 1919, contains an official report of the shooting by the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission of a printer named Michael Ivanovsky “for the printing of proclamations issued by the Socialists-Revolutionists of the Left.” Later several Socialists-Revolutionists, among them Soronov, were shot “for having proclamations and appeals in their possession.”
On May 1, 1919, the Izvestia of Odessa, official organ of the Soviet in that city, published the following account of the infliction of the death penalty for belonging to an organization. It said:
The Special Branch of the Staff of the Third Army has uncovered the existence of an organization, the Union of the Russian People, now calling itself “the Russian Union for the People and the State.” The entire committee was arrested.
After giving the names of those arrested the account continued:
The case of those arrested was transferred to the Military Tribunal of the Soviet of the Third Army. Owing to the obvious activity of the members of the Union directed against the peaceful population and the conquests of the Revolution, the Revolutionary Tribunal decided to sentence the above-mentioned persons to death. The verdict was carried out on the same night.
On May 6, 1919, Severnaya Communa published the following order from the Defense Committee:
Order No. 8 of the Defense Committee. The Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution is to take measures to suppress all forms of official crime, and not to hesitate at shooting the guilty. The Extraordinary Committee is bound to indict not only those who are guilty of active crime, but also those who are guilty of inaction of authority or condonement of crime, bearing in mind that the punishment must be increased in proportion to the responsibility attached to the post filled by the guilty official.
On May 14, 1919, Izvestia published an article by a Bolshevist official describing what happened in the Volga district as the Bolsheviki advanced. This article is important because it calls attention to a form of terrorism not heretofore mentioned: it will be remembered that in the latter part of 1918 the Bolsheviki introduced the system of rationing out food upon class lines, giving to the Red Army three times as much food per capita as to the average of the civil population, and dividing the latter into categories. The article under consideration shows very clearly how this system was made an instrument of terrorism:
Instructions were received from Moscow to forbid free trade, and to introduce the class system of feeding. After much confusion, this made the population starve in a short time, and rebel against the food dictatorship.... “Was it necessary to introduce the class system of feeding into the Volga district so haphazardly?” asks the writer. “Oh no. There was enough bread ready for shipment in that region, and in many places it was rotting, because of the lack of railroad facilities. The class-feeding system did not increase the amount of bread.... It did create, together with the inefficient policy, and the lack of a distribution system, a state of starvation, which provoked dissatisfaction.”
Throughout 1919 the official Bolshevist press continued to publish accounts of the arrest of hostages. Thus Izvestia of the Petrograd Soviet of Workmen’s and Red Army Deputies (No. 185), August 16, 1919, published an official order by the acting Commandant of the fortified district of Petrograd, a Bolshevist official named Kozlovsky. The two closing paragraphs of this order follow: